Monday Open Thread [8.8.16]

Filed in National by on August 8, 2016

VIRGINIA–PRESIDENT–CBS News/YouGov–Clinton 49, Trump 37, Johnson 7, Stein 2
NEVADA–PRESIDENT–CBS News/YouGov–Clinton 43, Trump 41, Johnson 4, Stein 3
ARIZONA–PRESIDENT–CBS News/YouGov–Trump 44, Clinton 42, Johnson 5, Stein 2

That means we move Arizona back to red and our election map is now…

Polling.Map.8.2.16

Just how badly did Trump blow his convention? The Fix: “Before the conventions, the plurality of support each candidate received was thanks to people who wanted to vote against the alternative. In other words, most people who said they were backing Hillary Clinton were backing her because they wanted to see Trump lose, and vice versa.”

“After the conventions, though, that changed: A slight plurality of Clinton supporters now back her because they want her to be the president. Trump’s position improved slightly — but the percentage of support he gets from people who are doing so out of enthusiasm for his candidacy is still lower than the percent who said that about Clinton before the conventions began. Before the conventions, 57 percent of those who backed Trump did so because they opposed Clinton; after the conventions, that figure was 56 percent.”

“Donald Trump is trying to quickly reset his presidential campaign to address worsening poll numbers and growing isolation from influential members of the Republican Party,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “At weekend rallies, the GOP nominee read from a hand-held script and offered endorsements for the re-elections of a trio of Capitol Hill Republicans whom he had toyed with rebuffing. On Monday, he will head to Detroit to deliver an economic policy address that is expected to draw contrasts with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Many in Mr. Trump’s party have been clamoring for weeks to see these kinds of adjustments. If he is to persuade Republican skeptics to buy back into his campaign, just weeks before the crucial post-Labor Day stage, the unorthodox, first-time candidate now must show he can make the changes stick.”

Hand-held script? Terse endorsements? Josh Marshall wonders who bigfooted Donald?

So what happened? Some have suggested that Trump realized that Ryan was going to win easily and wanted to get out in front of that embarrassment. More persuasive to me though is the suggestion that he was given an ultimatum of some sort. The most logical one would be for the RNC to withdraw its money and personnel from supporting Trump. That would be particularly devastating for Trump. Usually it’s the party and congressional candidates that have to rely on the money and inertial force of the presidential campaign, which has the fullest coffers and best people in the field. It’s always a coordinated effort between presidential candidate and party. But in this case, the balance is entirely different. Even though Trump now seems to be raising competitive money, he barely has a campaign in the field to speak of. And that’s simply not something that can be stood up on a dime. No matter how much money you have that takes time.

But who would give that ultimatum? Reince Priebus? It seems off. And would the ultimatum even be credible? In most campaigns the obvious answer would be the campaign chairman, a top advisor or a group of major donors who would deliver such a message. But we’ve seen that those folks have zero control over him. Another consideration is Trump’s children. They seem to be the only ones who can shift his direction with other than threats. Did they get into the mix?

Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey writes in the Seattle Times:

Trump sounds like a 12-year-old — a willful and abusive braggart. He is remarkably ignorant and uneducated about the world that we face and the means we may use to defend ourselves.

I served in the Armed Forces for 32 years. At retirement, I was a four-star joint-theater commander. In my considered judgment, Trump is unqualified to be the president of the United States and fulfill the role of commander in chief of the 2.2 million men and women of the Armed Forces.

FiveThirtyEight says Hillary’s convention bounce is holding steady: “Wait a couple more weeks to see where the dust settles. Our now-cast, for example, which projects what would happen in a hypothetical election held today, has Clinton winning the popular vote by 8 percentage points. My guess is that that will tick down a couple of points in the coming days. Our polls-plus model, which accounts for convention bounces and so discounts some of Clinton’s recent surge, projects her to win on Nov. 8 by 4 points. And our polls-only model, which basically takes the polls at face-value, projects her to win by 7.”

“But it’s also possible that Clinton’s strong numbers aren’t solely the result of a fleeting post-convention afterglow… Trump’s recent struggles — his attacks on the Khan family and feuds with Republican leadership, for instance — could be inflicting more durable damage to his chances. Trump is the least-liked major party nominee in modern history. Perhaps the conventions and their aftermath, when many voters presumably tuned into the 2016 race for the first time, established a new equilibrium. Perhaps this is 1988 all over again, with the parties reversed.”

This Clinton multimedia team is great.

GOP strategist Rick Wilson argues in the New York Daily News that Donald Trump needs to be “on the business end of a decisive, humiliating defeat.”

The first reason the loss at the polls needs to be total: to snuff out the corrosive fiction that the system is rigged. Trump hasn’t just leveled this charge, ridiculously, about the Republican primary, which he won despite the elites trying to stop him, and somewhat less ridiculously about the Democratic one. He’s now complaining before the fact that the November election will be fixed…

The second reason Trump needs to fall hard in November is that the Party of Lincoln needs a complete, top-to-bottom reset — one that completely purges the Trumpkins who believe racial animus is a governing philosophy and that their ignorant and angry primal screams can ever build a Republican majority.

If you don’t get this, go to the 538 forecast section and check out the Nowcast versus the other forecasts.



Scott Lemieux at The New Republic writes—How Republican Efforts to Suppress the Vote Backfired Big Time:

The cases of the past month were remarkable for different reasons. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision striking down North Carolina’s particularly draconian voter suppression law found that the statute was intentionally discriminatory. This is normally a difficult standard to meet, but given the facts, Judge Diana Motz had little difficulty reaching her conclusion. The day after theShelby decision held that the state was not required to clear changes to its election laws with the Department of Justice, the North Carolina legislature requested race-based voting data. It proceeded to target African-American voters with, as Judge Motz put it, “almost surgical precision,” enacting five different measures that made it more difficult for them to vote.

Most of these changes—such as eliminating Sunday voting and reducing the time period for early voting—didn’t even pretend to have any electoral integrity, in contrast to voter ID laws, which are ostensibly about countering the nearly nonexistent problem of voter fraud. The only way North Carolina Republicans could have been more blatantly discriminatory would have been to show up at the ballot wearing white sheets, and a unanimous Fourth Circuit panel refused to look the other way.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision earlier in July striking down significant parts of a similar Texas law was also significant.

It appears that Jill Stein is a dirty Russian traitor too.

In his Wall St. Journal op-ed, Ruy Teixeira explains “Why the Democrats Have Turned Left.” In addition to the demographic transformation that is profoundly changing American politics, public skepticism is growing about our economic system’s failure to deliver economic progress. Teixeira adds, “Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly said that during her first 100 days she would call upon Congress to dramatically increase spending on roads, bridges and other public works, including to provide universal broadband and build a clean energy grid. Her $275 billion program, if implemented, would represent the greatest investment in American infrastructure since the development of the interstate highway system in the 1950s.”

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  1. anonymous says:
    August 8, 2016 at 8:52 am

    A fun piece from Charles Pierce of Esquire on the implosion of the GOP:

    http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a47375/end-of-republican-party/

  2. puck says:
    August 8, 2016 at 10:25 am

    Trump to read speech on the economy this afternoon:

    Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday plans to call for a temporary moratorium on new financial regulations, Bloomberg News reported… He will also call for a repeal of the estate tax and will propose a tax rate of 15 percent for U.S. businesses.

    Charlie Copeland’s support of Trump is rewarded. But we’ve seen this movie before and it always ends badly for most of us.

    Here’s the part that is new:

    During the speech, the candidate will talk about his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership… He will also propose a cap on child-care costs.

    The one good thing about this angle from Trump is that he may force Hillary to commit to her TPP opposition in her own words.

  3. Ben says:
    August 8, 2016 at 12:56 pm

    Im doing it so you dont have to……………….. Watching the Trump speech reading. Clearly waiting for the prompter to scroll…. seems to have gotten booed for saying “isolation is not an option”.

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